Posted on 05/06/2018 1:38:55 PM PDT by BenLurkin
When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea — keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.
But the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff — while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as “load-and-go,” could set off an explosion.
The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a “potential safety risk.” A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was “contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It did add a lot of weight ( at $10,000/kg to orbit), and there’s always the risk of the pyrotechnics going off unexpectedly.
They made a judgment call, they got away with it 99% of the time.
*sigh*
It's hard to take a foam impact seriously.
Thinking of it as a foam impact rather than a foam-reinforced ice block impact militated strongly against a generation raised on Nerf guns and Nerf bats worrying much about it.
So we are launching our astronauts into space?
Missed that one dude.
I stand corrected
My bad, I should have known when you have enough money to launch a convertible, he was the solution
The way I understand it, SpaceX is supposed to do a manned launch of either the Dragon or the Dragon v2.0 capsule later this year.
Unless the pearl-clutchers block it because it’s dangerous!
Thanks BenLurkin. Gosh, it's almost as if the great pork barrel/gravy train alliance is unhappy about something.
Anyone in the space industry knows that man space flight is inherently dangerous. In the early days of the Mercury and Gemini and even the Apollo missions, the chances of the guys sitting on top of the rocket getting blown into hash were pretty high.
I’m not sure that escaping out of an engulfing fireball is worth the effort. Out of a “regular” fire down below, yes, but that’s not the likely outcome of a fuel-loading incident.
—
The ablative heat shield on the capsule would be facing any explosion. It is survivable with a launch-abort system.
ABSOLUTELY!!!
But if the agenda is to keep mankind (or at least Americans) confined to the Erf’s surface, then any perceived risk is too high.
Anything to humble America, hobble capitalism, prevent progress, concentrate power to the elites and impoverish the rest of us. Anything.
IIRC, it wasn’t a seat. It was a boom that deployed out 40(?) or so feet from the hatch. the astronauts were supposed to get unbuckled, stand up against any acceleration forces, clip a ring onto this rod and slide away and off the rod past the exhaust plume, free fall, and deploy parachutes...
I think they added that system after Challenger, and was only intended for when the Orbiter was gliding.
The first couple of flights had ejection seats that could have been used during ascent.
HA! We were on the same page at Wiki. I found this:
“A particular significant enhancement was bailout capability. Unlike the ejection seat in a fighter plane, the shuttle had an inflight crew escape system[10] (ICES). The vehicle was put in a stable glide on autopilot, the hatch was blown, and the crew slid out a pole to clear the orbiter’s left wing. They would then parachute to earth or the sea. While this at first appeared only usable under rare conditions, there were many failure modes where reaching an emergency landing site was not possible yet the vehicle was still intact and under control.”
I Laika your post...
I am not on the Musk train.
I smell Ken Lay.
Laika the Space Dog was under-appreciated. I don't care that Laika was a Soviet dog either. Dogs have no ideology. Dogs are dogs! But Laika was a Space Dog and that makes her extra special.
Hurled into space with one meal and a 7-day supply of oxygen, poor Laika was doomed from the start.
Hopefully Laika has a special place in dog heaven.
Indeed!
...Gemini 8 came out of the [radio] dead zone [after the first-ever docking of two vehicles], and Mission Control’s radio crackled on. It was Dave Scott’s voice: "We have a serious problem here.”Thrusters on both the Agena [booster] and the Gemini were firing out of control, spinning the still-connected ships wildly. Hoping the malfunction was in the Agena, [Neil] Armstrong undocked — but Gemini 8 started spinning even faster. The two astronauts’ vision began to blur; they were spinning at one revolution per second and were starting to lose consciousness. Knowing he had only seconds to make a decision, Armstrong shut down the thrusters entirely. Which meant they wouldn’t spin any faster — but since there’s no friction in space, they weren’t slowing down either.
The Gemini had a backup thruster system, used only for reentry — and with only enough fuel for reentry. But Armstrong knew he didn’t have a choice; he switched to backup control, and began to manually fire opposite thrusters to stop the spin. Which worked — but in the process, used up three-quarters of the fuel Armstrong and Scott needed to get out of orbit and safely back through the atmosphere.
Immediately, Mission Control began to plan for an emergency landing, three days ahead of time. Instead of splashing down in the Atlantic, as planned, Gemini 8 would have to reenter the atmosphere beyond the range of NASA’s tracking stations, over China, and land 500 miles east of Okinawa.
Astonishingly, the emergency reentry came off without a hitch — though the remote landing spot meant Armstrong and Scott had to spend three hours bobbing around in the ocean, desperately sea-sick, while they waited for a Navy destroyer to come and pick them up. Other than that, they were perfectly okay. And they both went on to walk on the Moon.
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